Consciousness and Its Implications Professor Daniel N. Robinson THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Daniel N. Robinson, Ph.D. Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University Daniel N. Robinson is a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University, where he has lectured annually since 1991. He is also Distinguished Professor, Emeritus at Georgetown University, on whose faculty he served for 30 years. He was formerly Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. Professor Robinson earned his Ph.D. in neuropsychology from City University of New York. Prior to taking his position at Georgetown, he held positions at Amherst College, Princeton University, and Columbia University. Professor Robinson is past president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association: the Division of History of Psychology and the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Professor Robinson’s publications cover an unusually wide range of disciplines, including law, philosophy of mind, brain sciences, psychology, moral philosophy, American history, and ancient history. He is former editor of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. He is also the author or editor of more than 40 books, including Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Application, Wild Beasts & Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present, An Intellectual History of Psychology, The Mind: An Oxford Reader, and Aristotle’s Psychology. In 2001, Professor Robinson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of History of Psychology of the American Psychological Association and the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology of the American Psychological Association. ©2007 The Teaching Company i Table of Contents Consciousness and Its Implications Professor Biography i Course Scope 1 Lecture One Zombies 2 Lecture Two Self-Consciousness 5 Lecture Three The “Problem” of Consciousness 8 Lecture Four The Explanatory Gap 11 Lecture Five Mental Causation 13 Lecture Six Other Minds 16 Lecture Seven Physicalism Refined 19 Lecture Eight Consciousness and Physics 22 Lecture Nine Qualia and the “Mary” Problem 25 Lecture Ten Do Computers Play Chess? 28 Lecture Eleven Autism, Obsession, and Compulsion 30 Lecture Twelve Consciousness and the End of Mental Life 32 Glossary 34 Biographical Notes 38 Bibliography 40 ©2007 The Teaching Company ii Consciousness and Its Implications Scope: The subject of consciousness is among the most vexing in both philosophy and science, and no less tractable in psychology, where the conceptual problems are often neglected. As a “state,” consciousness seems resistant to translation into physical terms and measurements, though its dependence on a healthy nervous system appears to be as close to a “cause-effect” relationship as any in the natural sciences. The aim and scope of these 12 lectures must be modest, for the subject is as vast as that of human and animal awareness. What I hope to convey may be distilled into four main points: First, that consciousness and mental life are sui generis; they are not “like” anything else. They are not like anything that is material or physical and seem to require for their fuller understanding a science not yet available, if ever available. Second, what distinguishes consciousness (and the term presupposes consciousness of something) from all else is its phenomenology—there is something it is like to be “conscious” that is different from all other facts of nature. Third, conscious awareness is a power possessed by the normal percipient, including non-human percipients. This power is such that much that impinges on the sense organs is filtered out and sometimes only the weakest but the most “meaningful” of occurrences gains entrance. Fourth, such powers vary over the course of a lifetime, are subject to disease and defect, and thus, lead to questions of profound ethical consequence. Here, then, is a topic in which science, philosophy, medicine, and ethics are merged, the result being issues at once intriguing and unsettling. ©2007 The Teaching Company 1 Lecture One Zombies Scope: In this course, we will attempt to unravel the nature of consciousness, its provenance, and its function. We begin with an examination of the concept of the zombie, which functions effectively as a physical entity without consciousness. If a system can solve problems and process information without consciousness, of what value is consciousness? The question of ethics is raised if we consider that entities without consciousness cannot be judged for their actions. Could such an entity strive for moral improvement? The subject of consciousness is vast and varied and, as a philosophical problem, far from an easy solution. Outline I. Our core questions in this course on consciousness are: What is it? How does it come about? What is it for? A. Popular speech is rife with references to consciousness. We talk about being “half conscious” or “unconscious” of something; the act of “daydreaming” reflects by contrast on a vividly conscious life; the patient in the emergency room is suffering a “loss of consciousness.” B. Zombies, the “walking dead,” accomplish what they do without consciousness. 1. Philosophical zombies are different from the Hollywood version. 2. They are created to test certain notions we have about the essence of mental life and the properties that life must have to qualify as “consciously” lived. C. Some years ago, Güven Güzeldere summarized various ways of configuring such entities and then understanding their nature. 1. One might make a device that is indistinguishable from conscious human beings in the way it behaves, though its internal machinery would be nothing like our own (a behavioral zombie). 2. A better “fit” than the behavioral zombie is the functional zombie, which does and says what we do and say; its underlying systems function as ours do but do not include anything by way of consciousness, let alone self-consciousness. 3. The third kind of zombie, the identical zombie, has an anatomy fully identical with that of a human. D. These three types of zombie capture the various ways philosophers have attempted to dissolve the seeming mystery of consciousness. 1. One solution to the problem of consciousness is behavioristic: X is properly regarded as “conscious” to the extent that its behavior is relevantly like that of anything that is regarded as being conscious. 2. Other philosophers might use more stringent criteria: Not only must there be behavioral similarities of the right sort, but these must come about in the right sort of way. 3. The behavior must express underlying physiological processes of just the sort that underlie our own actions and speech. 4. To the extent that the device functions the way we do, we are permitted to regard it as conscious in the relevant sense. 5. But this entity nonetheless has no consciousness as we understand that state; physical foundations are unable to account for the consciousness itself. E. If not physical properties, what other properties are there? Consider a system entirely physical but nonetheless conscious. How does a system entirely and solely physical come to have this defining mental property? F. Some philosophers reject the very idea of zombies in any terms that would settle issues in philosophy of mind. 1. Nigel Thomas, in his essay entitled “Zombie Killer,” argued that the very foundational premise on which zombie examples are constructed is defective. ©2007 The Teaching Company 2 2. If we accept what is now widely endorsed by scientists and philosophersthat our own conscious experiences are nothing more than the result of our own brain and bodily functionsthen zombies are, indeed, problematical. 3. But if zombies are a conceptual possibility, then functionalism must be false. G. In his essay “Does Consciousness Exist?” William James (1842–1910) argued that the function of “knowing,” if not explained by “consciousness,” must still be explained by some concept. II. We recognize the difference between the mere registration of an event and our knowledge of it: our knowing it—which raises the question of the value of direct awareness. A. Direct awareness is not a requirement for learning or memory. A computer’s memory can take on whole megabytes of new information, while being unaware of the function it serves. B. So what is consciousness good for? This begs the question of whether the best account of those defining features of human nature are to be understood within an essentially evolutionary context. C. The more refined conceptions of evolutionary influences do not require that every property be useful. 1. Consciousness, it might be argued, is an epiphenomenon of evolutionlike an architectural spandrel, it is not functional. 2. The fully adapted being is akin to the zombie, but, owing to the formation of that being, consciousness appears as a byproduct. 3. Thus, consciousness may be regarded as a product of evolution, but with no embarrassment to the theory of evolution, just in case consciousness has no real function. D. To be a zombie may be like sleepwalking. 1. To be unaware implies having no conception of consciousness and self-consciousness in others. 2. What form of interaction might be possible among such entities? Could there be crime and punishment, moral improvement, an aesthetic dimension to life, and so on? 3. None of us would claim to be willing to live this sort of life because it is not as rich a life as ours. E. What of such “dissociative” disorders as “multiple personalities” that might have someone conscious of being someone else, or of stages of infancy at which there is consciousness but no basis for its personalization, or sleep, or dream-states, or of autoscopy and near-death experiences? III. The word consciousness did not take on its current meaning in English until late in the 17 th century. John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding appeared in 1690 and made use of the term in a new way. A. Prior to Locke’s interpretation of the term, Thomas Hobbes said that what is “conscious” is just what is understood in common. B. In Locke’s work, consciousness takes on its private character, its contents found through introspection, by a mind able to examine its own content and that of no other. C. The word is problematical, and matters seem to become even more unsettled when we add a “self” to it. Essential Reading: Güzeldere, Güven, “Three Ways of Being a Zombie.” Presented at the University of Arizona conference Toward a Science of Consciousness, April 8–13, 1996, Tucson, Arizona. James, William, “Does Consciousness Exist?” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1904): 477–491. Supplementary Reading: Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651), book 1, chapter 7, p. 31. Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2, chapter 1, section 19, p. 115. ©2007 The Teaching Company 3 Questions to Consider: 1. Since zombies seem to be able to do so much without consciousness, what might be the effect of consciousness should they possess it while doing just these things? 2. Can there really be zombies? Can there be a “caretaker” zombie who is nonetheless “unconscious”? ©2007 The Teaching Company 4 Lecture Two Self-Consciousness Scope: In this lecture, we consider the proposition that conscious life is grounded in the real essence of mind and, as such, is somehow insulated from the changes that might otherwise be brought about by mere “matter in motion.” If the constituents of our own bodies continuously change, can we still retain an identifiable “self”? We again turn to the British empiricist John Locke (1632–1704) for his contribution to the issue. Outline I. What is the relationship between consciousness and knowledge? A. It is possible to imagine a zombie called George that responds to his name. 1. What is unimaginable is his knowing himself to be George, because, presumably, a zombie does not “know” anything. To know something is to be conscious of it and zombies are not conscious. 2. Consequently, they are not self-conscious. B. The claim “I am conscious of a rabbit in the garden” is different from the claim “I know there is a rabbit in the garden.” C. There is a difference between being conscious of and being conscious. 1. The former is always subject to error. 2. Being conscious or aware is to be the possible subject of an experience, i.e., the self. 3. In the older phenomenological literature, there is the common assumption that consciousness invariably includes a “self.” 4. For there to be knowledge, motives, desires, and beliefs, there must be consciousness, but these features of mental life are often in operation without the actor reflecting on all of them. II. With reflective consciousness, the focus is on self as the subject or source, but who or what is “self”? A. We could argue that an old ship, Old Faithful, that has been extensively rebuilt, is no longer Old Faithful. Since none of the constituents of our bodies remains constant over time, it might be argued that there is no self as such, for everything about us physically changes from moment to moment. B. Against all this is a venerable philosophical conception of entities that retain their identity over time and independently of physical changes. 1. On this understanding, a thing is what it is essentially, even if a number of so-called accidental changes are imposed on it. 2. Intellectuals of the 17 th century, especially Newton and Galileo, held that the last word on what really matters is to be provided by science. 3. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in his De Corpore of 1642 held that two distinguishable entities cannot be the same and that there was continuity of the person throughout the seasons of bodily change, given one condition. C. Hobbes set the stage for John Locke’s analysis of the issue. 1. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke develops the distinction between “real” and “nominal” essences. 2. What we come to regard as the “essence” of something arises from our own tendency to classify it in a manner that is convenient by our own lights. 3. What will give Locke or anyone else that continuing identity that might have been incorrectly regarded as one’s “real essence” is no more than that on which the various habits and dispositions of the mind settle. 4. It is the manner in which human intelligence perceives and uses entities that determines their “nominal essence.” 5. Locke gave the problem of personal identity its modern formulation. ©2007 The Teaching Company 5 6. Faithful to Newtonian science, Locke regarded the real essence of a thing to be beyond the power of sense, a congeries of sub-microscopic particles held together by gravitational forces but perceived in ways that generate such nominal characterizations as “Fellow of the Royal Society” or “a rational animal.” 7. These characterizations arise from conventional discourse, the contingencies of culture and context, the nuances of perception, memory, and mental life. 8. Locke accepts that there is a real essence, but he rejects the claim that this is given to us in our observations of a thing. D. Locke reduces personal identity itself to the merely contingent contents of consciousness: It is hostage to the limitations of memory and the vagaries of experience. 1. Locke’s famous example of the prince and cobbler, the contents of whose respective consciousness were switched, tells us that each man will be “the same man” but not “the same person.” 2. The “real essence” of neither is disclosed by such nominal features as a princely bearing or special skill in turning leather. E. How does this all play out in the matter of self-consciousness and that vexing self of self-consciousness? 1. Older philosophical schools tend to identify self with soul, namely, with an enduring feature of the individual, immune to changes that otherwise alter the conditions of the body. 2. On this understanding, behind all the changes that might take place in the life of John Smith, there is an essential John Smith that remains unchanged throughout the seasons of life. 3. If Locke’s metaphysical mission is one of “Newtonianizing” the mind, then the first step must be the elimination of such a worrisome, nonphysical item as the “essential” self and the seemingly dual nature of reality—partly physical and partly something else. III. Locke is considered one of the fathers of British empiricism, which reduces all that is factually knowable to what is observable or subject to perception. A. If a personal identity is analogous to Old Faithful, then to the extent to which various old planks of memory continue to be present in consciousness, the personal identity of the individual is preserved. B. Locke’s cobbler and prince will each be not merely the subject of experiences but will experience these as his own and, thus, as experiences that cannot be had in just this way by any other. 1. The amnesiac is not lacking in self-consciousness, though he may have lost his Lockean “personal identity.” 2. Locke knew this; he granted that we know ourselves to be the subjects of our experience intuitively and not as a result of systematic observation. IV. William James proposed that there were different senses of “self,” including the “material” self, the “social” self, and the “spiritual” self. A. Considering the spiritual self at all is a reflective process. B. Locke thought our knowledge of God and of ourselves was “intuitive,” whereas our knowledge of the necessary truths of geometry was “demonstrative” in that a formal argument is required to demonstrate the truth of the conclusions. C. Apart from these special cases, all of our factual knowledge comes, on Locke’s account, from experience. V. It is unclear that intuitive knowledge of one’s self must be included among the necessary starting points in examining and defining consciousness. A. Zombies are mindless. If consciousness is not necessary to account for seemingly mental achievements, why would self-consciousness be requisite? B. Moreover, is it really the case that a person always knows as a necessary truth and immediately that the thoughts occupying consciousness are his own? C. If “normal” knowledge of consciousness depends on the brain’s health and proper functioning, isn’t it contingent rather than necessary? ©2007 The Teaching Company 6 Essential Reading: James, William, Principles of Psychology, pp. 283–296. Robinson, D. N., ed., The Mind (Oxford Readers). Supplementary Reading: Bealer, G., “Self-consciousness,” Philosophical Review 106: 69–117. Questions to Consider: 1. In what sense might someone be conscious but not aware of himself or herself as the conscious entity? 2. If everything in the body (and brain) changes, minute-by-minute, how can our “self-consciousness” be explained in physical terms? ©2007 The Teaching Company 7 [...]... located, and this could be a key to a fuller understanding of the problem 26 ©2007 The Teaching Company 1 2 Our awareness of consciousness is likely be heightened by our ability to compare times when we lose consciousness (through sleep, illness, and so on) against times when we regain it Nevertheless, the number of times we lose consciousness in sleep has not significantly deepened our understanding of consciousness. .. complete” means that any and every entity to which real predicates are applicable is itself a physical substance, and if all predication in reality includes only physical properties, then “the problem of consciousness is just one more problem to be solved by physicists I If, however, consciousness is just a “code word” for an entity whose substantial nature is self-reflecting mental life, itself not reducible... of questions and answers there seem to be assumptions that have not had the benefit of serious challenge 1 As with the medieval “problem” of witches, we often try to solve a problem by ignoring the real problem and developing a sound solution to a very different problem 2 As we shall see in subsequent lectures, there are a number of candidate problems, many candidate solutions, and much candidate evidence... of the ancient Greek philosophers Essential Reading: Heil, John, and Alfred Mele, eds., Mental Causation Supplementary Reading: Kim, J., “Mental Causation and Consciousness: The Two Mind-Body Problems for the Physicalist,” in Physicalism and Its Discontents Questions to Consider: 1 What is a “cause”? 2 We enter a room, flip a switch, and light floods the room What would enter into a complete “causal”... to a single state, namely, a now specifiable single location and state 3 David Bohm (1917–1992) furthered the speculations of Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) on the connection between quantum physics and consciousness, applying the theoretical and observational aspects of quantum physics directly to the functions of the brain and to the problem of consciousness 4 Bohm, with his student Yakir Aharanov, showed... black -and- white room via a black -and- white television monitor 1 She knows all about the physics of light and colors 2 When she is released from her black -and- white world, she finds that her previous knowledge was incomplete, although she possessed all the necessary physical information B Qualia refer to qualities that enter into our experience of things; for example, roundness and redness stand as...Lecture Three The “Problem” of Consciousness Scope: In this lecture, we look at the perplexing relationship between the immaterial and the physical We ask what it is about consciousness that would concern a physicist, and we address the claim that “physics is complete.” We discover what Aristotle had to say about “real being,” substance, and causality and raise the question of how the physical... relationship between consciousness and awareness is direct, as is the relationship between awareness and attention D If we cannot get outside our own consciousness in order to study itin the same way that fish are not likely to discover water, for it is the abiding condition of their liveswe might nevertheless learn more about the nature of consciousness by seeing what happens when its functions are... versiondepersonalization disorderfinds the patient seeing himself at a distance and reflecting on his own behavior as if he were a disinterested witness 3 These conditions are especially intriguing because the patients have consciousness and are aware 4 Then, too, there are many altered states of consciousness, some caused by the use and misuse of drugs and alcohol Essential Reading: Sacks, O., The Man Who Mistook His... questions in ethics and moral thought A Beginning with our understanding of obligations and duties, we have the duty not to exploit or unjustly benefit from the vulnerabilities of others B When we consider our duty relating to the rights of those who are incapable of protecting their own rights, we must confront the nature and limits of the duties of the caretaker C These rights and duties do not apply . of Contents Consciousness and Its Implications Professor Biography i Course Scope 1 Lecture One Zombies 2 Lecture Two Self -Consciousness 5 Lecture Three The “Problem” of Consciousness. Consciousness and the End of Mental Life 32 Glossary 34 Biographical Notes 38 Bibliography 40 ©2007 The Teaching Company ii Consciousness and Its Implications Scope: The subject of consciousness. work, consciousness takes on its private character, its contents found through introspection, by a mind able to examine its own content and that of no other. C. The word is problematical, and